Making progress in clearing Taliban
Image by Rep. Keith Ellison via FlickrGen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said allied forces are in the "final stages" of a large operation to clear insurgent fighters from key regions just west of Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and principal focus of the coalition's military campaign against the Taliban.We are starting to see the cumulative effect of having an effective force to space ratio that the surge has provided. It starts to have a cascading effect against the enemy who tends to retreat rather than fight when dealing with the superior force of the US military.
Petraeus, speaking in an interview at NATO headquarters in Kabul, said the operation in the Zhari and Panjwai districts, which began a month ago and involves thousands of U.S., Afghan and Canadian troops, is proceeding "more rapidly than was anticipated." Military officials and Afghan leaders have reported increasing stability in large swaths of the area that had been firmly in the grip of insurgents a few weeks ago, although they acknowledge that they remain contested by pockets of Taliban holdouts.
The progress in Kandahar City's western fringe is shaping up to be an important part of the case Petraeus plans to make, during crucial assessments of the mission this fall by NATO and the White House, that international and Afghan forces have regained the momentum after years of losing ground to the Taliban.
The governor of Kandahar province, Tooryalai Wesa, drove through Zhari and Panjwai on Thursday to meet with 350 village elders, a trip that would have been too dangerous to make last month.
Petraeus and his subordinate commanders have been reluctant to trumpet their efforts in Kandahar out of concern that early claims of success could prove embarrassing if insurgents find a way to regroup and attack coalition forces, as some U.S. Marine officers learned during the large assault earlier this year in the Marja district of neighboring Helmand province. Military officials have said many insurgent fighters might have slipped out of Zhari and Panjwai as the allied operation intensified. But they say the troops intend to take advantage of the diminished Taliban presence to build up the capacity of the Afghan government and security forces, with the hope they will be able to fend off any insurgent counteroffensive.
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The earlier operations in Helmand had a lingering effect of the Taliban trying to blend in and come back but this gets harder as more and more sanctuaries are lost. The enemy is also having more difficulty infiltrating from Pakistan.
The Taliban are also running short of troops and have needed foreign fighters to fill in the ranks. This makes the Taliban even less popular with the local population and makes it easier for the US counterinsurgency teams to work with locals.
The US needs to be able to give some assurance that they can keep the Taliban for coming back. That is really going to be up to the Afghan forces since Obama has made it pretty clear he is eager to bug out as quickly as possible.
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